Image Credit: audacious-media-player.org
Back in the day before I ran out of XP activations (stupid thing kept crashing), I used to LOVE Winamp for managing and playing my MP3 collection. It was just so quick, minimal and responsive compared to more management-based programs like iTunes. Imagine my delight when I switched to Linux and discovered XMMS. It was love until the honeymoon stage wore off, and became annoyed by the ugly GTK1 menus and fonts, and the lack of development.
Enter Audacious, a fork of the similarly-fated Beep Media Player. It works with Winamp Classic skins, satisfying my inner Microsoft fanboy. It can play back MP3 plus a slew of other formats. It's got a little bit of effects processing, some Last.FM support, and a whole lot of visualization plugins (like Paranormal!). Install this player, young grasshopper, and go terrorize ShoutCast with your listenership.
How to install, you ask? Fire up your trusty terminal, and enter the following secret password:
sudo apt-get install audacious
Now, if you're feeling a bit randy, you may want some plugins as well. No prob, Rob!:
sudo apt-get install audacious-crossfade audacious-plugins
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5 comments:
Have a look at Foobar2000 for windows.
Just tried it again. It lags.. The best I've found to the moment is QuodLibet.
Anyway, thanks for the article!
I have been using Audacious. It was installed by default in Wolvix Linux - along with Exaile, the GTK2 clone of Amarok.
I find myself preferring Audacious. It is very good, quite snappy. Mostly, I have it minimized to tray with Pypanel on Openbox.
@tallman, I've not heard of QuodLibet. I'll have to look into it. And I'll even try Foobar2000 the next time I use XP.
Us "lusers" are spoilt for choice when it comes to music players. Gtk and there's Audacious, Banshee, Exaile, Rhythmbox, QuodLibet, and that's just off the top of my head. I'm not so sure on the Qt offerings but I've used Amarok and it's very, very impressive. There's much more good choice than on Windows.
Getting back to XMMS/BMP, they are not dead projects - those are just the old and now unsupported versions. Check out BMPx and XMMS2. (Saying that, the BMPx site wasn't working just now but I checked the Google cache and it was updated at least as recently as Oct2007.)
As for Windows music players, I find musikCube to be the best.
- Charlie (of Free Gamer fame)
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